Dr. James H. Duke Jr., Texas Trauma Surgeon, Dies at 86

Dr. James H. Duke Jr., a Houston trauma surgeon who treated Gov. John Connally of Texas on the day of the Kennedy assassination and reached a national audience through his syndicated television reports on medical topics and his frequent appearances on “Today” and the “NBC Nightly News,” died on Tuesday in Houston. He was 86.

His death was announced in a statement by his family and by the medical institutions with which he was affiliated, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and its primary teaching hospital, Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. No cause was specified.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Dr. Duke, known as Red, was a fourth-year surgery resident at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. While on break, he heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and was being brought to Parkland. “I actually for a moment thought, ‘Well, I’m going to get to meet a president,’ ” he recalled in an interview with the Texas public television station KERA in 2013. “ ‘I’ve never met one of those.’ ”

After seeing the president, he said, he realized instantly that he could be of little help. When a colleague said, “The guy across the hall could use some help,” he ran to the side of Governor Connally, whom he did not recognize, and prepared him for surgery.

“He had this big chest wound,” Dr. Duke told KERA. “His lung was flopping in and out. So I stopped it up and put a chest tube in him — just like you do any other gunshot wound.” The two became lifelong friends and hunting partners.

Dr. Duke’s brush with history was little more than a colorful footnote to a distinguished career that began when he joined the University of Texas’ two-year-old medical school in Houston in 1972. There he helped build a three-person department into a Level 1 trauma center — one of only two in the city.

In 1976, seeing the potential in a new helipad at Hermann Hospital, he helped create the state’s first air-ambulance service, Life Flight, which overcame the distance problems presented by Houston’s almost limitless sprawl. “That model became the standard of care, not just in Houston but a lot of other places,” said Dr. Billy Gill, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

On TV, with his bristling mustache, wire-rimmed glasses and Texas twang, Dr. Duke delivered the Health Science Center’s “Texas Health Report” in a punchy, down-home style that made complicated medical questions easy to understand and fun to watch. In one characteristic segment, wearing jeans and a hard hat, he blasted away at some concrete paving with a jackhammer to show how doctors dealt with kidney stones. The reports made him a popular interview subject and led to a job as the host of “Bodywatch,” a nine-part PBS series broadcast in 1987.

His manner was no put-on. “We were all Hoss or Bud,” a medical colleague recalled in a video filmed by UT Health last year. “I was just one of 475 Hosses.”

Dr. Duke might announce, when in a feisty mood, Dr. Gill said: “I’m on a high-protein diet today. I just chewed a resident’s butt.” He liked to refer to a certain type of lawyer as “slicker than deer guts hanging from a doorknob.” In a 2012 tribute, Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, called him “a world-class surgeon trapped in a Texan’s body.”

James Henry Duke Jr. was born on Nov. 16, 1928, in Ennis, a suburb of Dallas, and grew up in Hillsboro, in Central Texas. His red hair earned him his nickname. As a boy, he delivered The Dallas Morning News, hunted and fished, and became an Eagle Scout.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in business from Texas A&M in 1950, he served as an Army tank commander for two years in Germany. Intending to become a minister, he attended the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and married Betty Cowden, a fellow student. The marriage ended in divorce. After graduating from the seminary in 1955, he was inspired by a book about Albert Schweitzer to change his career to medicine.

He received his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in 1960 and, after completing his residency, taught there and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. While in New York he did graduate work at Columbia University in chemical engineering, biochemistry and computer science.

After a stint teaching surgery in Afghanistan, Dr. Duke joined the faculty of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, now also known as UT Health, where he spent the rest of his career. A founding member of the American Trauma Society and for 40 years the medical director of Life Flight, he helped develop a statewide trauma system and played a leading role in getting the Texas Legislature to pass a seatbelt law in 1985.

He is survived by a son, Hank; three daughters, Rebecca, Sara and Hallie Duke; a sister, Helen Patricia Hipps; seven grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.

In 1987, Dr. Duke inspired an ABC television series, “Buck James,” starring Dennis Weaver as a Texas-talkin’, straight-shootin’ country doctor working at a university hospital in Houston. To prepare for the role, Mr. Weaver trailed Dr. Duke on his rounds for two weeks. Dr. Duke made a cameo appearance on one episode. No scalpel needed — he was cast as an oil-rig foreman.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Dr. James H. Duke Jr., Trauma Surgeon Known for Accessible Style, Dies at 86 . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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